Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 499 posts

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#241

Post by KirinDave »

scythe wrote: post #197
KirinDave wrote: post #130

If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…

Are these limitations in the protocol, or just in the network, especially freenode? If someone were to run a paid, $5-a-month to run a channel with over 20 users IRC network, would they be able to address the difficulties of freenode and EFNet before it? Would SILC fix anything?

Why would this even be desirable?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#242

Post by mike_hearn »

davexunit wrote: post #232

Completely agree! I see free software projects depend on proprietary tools all the time and it is very frustrating. I often see projects using JIRA or asking companies like JetBrains for gratis licenses to proprietary development tools, and now I'm seeing Slack more frequently. I will not participate in your free software project if you depend on SaaSS or proprietary software to get work done. The company I work for…

What makes you think IRC isn't centrally logged? You realise that the Freenode staff have root on all Freenode servers, right? It's not actually a decentralised network at all, it just looks superficially like one from the outside: they could log whatever they wanted at any time.

I'm not even sure the servers use encryption between each other. If they do I didn't see any mention of it on the freenode website.

Heck, given that SSL isn't even a default for many IRC clients, I suspect that in practice it's vastly easier for governments to eavesdrop on IRC than on Slack which is fully SSL, always.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#243

Post by tptacek »

sdegutis wrote: post #104
ChuckMcM wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really resonate with this position. IRC is open source and it has had problems FOR DECADES. IM programs from third parties add genuinely useful features which people clearly want. So rather than call for a general boycott of Slack (a negative approach) why not call to fix IRC?

IRC is just a well-established and battle-tested server/client protocol. I'm eager for the day when a competing open source server/client protocol emerges and takes over. I imagine all it would take is a really good reference implementation server and client that everyone can just start using, right?

It's a well-established shitty protocol, largely designed in the early 1990s as the simplest thing that could possibly work for the workloads we had in the early 1990s. It's terribly limited (7 bit, small message sizes, virtually no useful metadata) and in the 98% use case, its "distributed" characteristics cause more problems than they solve.

No competent person setting out to design a group communications protocol in 2015 could honestly say they'd use IRC as a starting point.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#244

Post by KirinDave »

jarek wrote: post #209
tormeh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I like the Emacs shortcuts! And "buffer" is a sensible way to describe an opened file. It has worked for decades and will continue to work for decades more! Get off my lawn, whippersnappers!

I, for one, think that reinventing the wheel is a totally great idea and that we should have more npms and less apts

I, for one, think that the march of technological experimentation and progress should stop unless we can convince specifically jarek of the value of any given project, as jarek has demonstrated that they want to become the arbiters of all value judgments.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#245

Post by MichaelGG »

vonklaus wrote: post #33

It is reasonable to raise the point that building FOSS software while using a closed piece of software as a core tool bears consideration. However, I am 25 and largely missed the boat on irc. I decided to start using it ~1 year ago. It is hard to use, but we will look at that in a minute. Often, we assume people have as clear an idea of what we are talking about as we do. That is often not the case. Let's explore IRC…

Given how terrible the HipChat client is on Windows, it's really saying a lot that people end up choosing that over IRC.

Maybe Freenode could implement an enhanced IRC protocol and clients could opt-in to that.

I know at least one project that was very active on IRC, and they moved to HipChat for convenience. They also went full-on with the entire Atlassian stack (again, the fact anyone would choose JIRA is damning against everything else.)

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#246

Post by bitL »

simias wrote: post #154
KirinDave wrote: post #130

If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC . Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. The "IRC Features" section bugs me, too. Unless you run a private IRC server IRC has a long, tortured history of design-based security difficulties. Gone are the days of netsplits permanently owning channels, but the…

IRC is used by many projects small and big and I've used it in a few companies as well, it's not like it's an absurd concept. I don't know if Slack is better or worse (I've never used it, I thought the title was talking about Slackware linux which seemed odd) but you draw a much bleaker portrait of IRC than what I experience day to day using it extensively. Now if you want to talk about mailing lists I might side wit…

Slack is basically IRC with "subjectively nicer" design and helpful integrations, e.g. your builds, deployment, compilation progress can show up on separate channels, you can see if somebody mentioned you on twitter etc. You get the idea. Principally it's just extended IRC, maybe they even use slightly modified IRC protocol underneath for anything chat-wise.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#247

Post by xena »

mike_hearn wrote: post #242
davexunit wrote: post #232

Completely agree! I see free software projects depend on proprietary tools all the time and it is very frustrating. I often see projects using JIRA or asking companies like JetBrains for gratis licenses to proprietary development tools, and now I'm seeing Slack more frequently. I will not participate in your free software project if you depend on SaaSS or proprietary software to get work done. The company I work for…

What makes you think IRC isn't centrally logged? You realise that the Freenode staff have root on all Freenode servers, right? It's not actually a decentralised network at all, it just looks superficially like one from the outside: they could log whatever they wanted at any time. I'm not even sure the servers use encryption between each other. If they do I didn't see any mention of it on the freenode website. Heck, g…

The software is very simple and doesn't have the ability to log messages like that. I maintain a fork of the ircd freenode uses and that simplicity has actually been a bit of a pain as things grow.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#248

Post by nfd »

orofino wrote: post #136

Allow me to shout into the void for a minute here... 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. 3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office. 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, mes…

Slack and IRC have two different (but interconnected) use cases. I love IRC, and I haunt a couple servers to chill or to ask an occasional newbie question. I'm pretty comfortable with IRC; it's a part of my culture.

I often find myself needing to establish a line of communication between people who aren't particularly tech-savvy. Slack works excellently for this: I make a new team, fire off some invites, and everyone just understands how it works. I can only imagine that, say, coordinating dev, corporate, and sales over IRC would be like living in the same circle of hell cardinally occupied by people who talk at the theater. If IRC works well for your team (whatever it is), excellent! Don't try to fix something that isn't broken. Slack isn't flawless, but it does have its usecases, and it fills them very nicely.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#249

Post by notwedtm »

Hello71 wrote: post #196
orofino wrote: post #136

Allow me to shout into the void for a minute here... 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. 3. Slack doesn't require me to install IRC somewhere. Which also means I don't have to worry about how people gain connectivity to said server when outside the office. 4. Slack has whimsy. Fun colors, mes…

> 1. Slack is a well-designed interface for allowing teams to communicate via chat. subjective. I consider a bloated web interface taking several tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM compared to a text-based interface taking less than 100 kB to be poorly designed. > 2. Slack is easy to install is use on Mac, PC, iOS, and Android. It Just Works™. spelled wrong, and IRC clients are harder to configure only because ther…

This whole response reads like it was written in the 90's. Most people don't care if something takes up 10's of MB's of RAM when new PC's are shipping with 16-32GB standard.

Your comparison of what amounts to ASCII art versus Slack's rich-media embedding reads like it is straight out of a Fortran developer's "I'm still relevant" handbook. You even offer up AOL and ICQ as counter examples!

If we're going there, I guess we should simply assign everyone a GUID and be done with it, right?

HMU on ICQ: 110339943

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#250

Post by mike_hearn »

netcan wrote: post #228
jedberg wrote: post #160

This is the perfect counter example to "Open source is better". IRC has been around for 20+ years. But a company that is just a few years old blows it away feature-wise. Sure, you can do all the same stuff in IRC, but look right at the article for why you wouldn't. The answer to every "missing feature" in IRC is to install some extra software and then maintain it. I'm don't want to waste time doing that, I've got pro…

I generally agree, though I'm not sure financial incentive is the reason. Open source has really shown that financial incentive is (A) complex and (B) not the only thing that motivates people. If you look at open and closed source across a lot of categories, I think it's more common to see OS "win" where the product is more objective. When it come to more subjective problems like UX, it seems to be more difficult. If…

What you're trying to say is that open source works best when there's little or no design work involved and little or no product vision required.

Linux is a canonical example: it's simply a clone, design wise, of a plain old UNIX. The product vision was "copy UNIX". Where the wheels fell off Linux is the moment it got ahead of the UNIX legacy (i.e. modern desktops) and started having to compete with Windows, so suddenly the "copy UNIX" goal was no longer relevant. But Windows was made by Microsoft, or "the great satan" as Stallman memory called it.

So simply switching the goal to "copy Windows" wasn't possible because Windows and UNIX were very different and anyway, lots of people hated Windows. Linux had picked up a lot of semi-technical and technical users who didn't care much about FOSS purity but loved the club feeling that using an obscure OS brought them. The end result was big splits and bizarre, illogical design decisions being made simply because "do it like Windows did" was ideologically unthinkable, even when Windows had basically got it right (or at least, less wrong).

Post reply on HN